>>1806743>secret hidden stone houses/cavesNot sure what you mean by that . . . but that's reminded me of the yarn of the Lady in The Lake.
Lake Hauroko is the deepest lake in NZ, located deep in Southland, the bottom of the country. There is a lake there called Mary Island, which was for a long time considered to be the site of a maori curse (tapu). These kinds of things usually occur when a tribe is massacred etc. However in 1963 in a tunnel by the waterline an archaeologist discovered the mummified remains of a maori woman (pic rel)
The skeleton is wrapped in a cloak of weka feathers with a dogskin collar, she is sitting upright on a chair made from sticks and twine. There was originally a barricade of wood and fern to prevent access to the cave Her death is dated to roughly the 1650s-1700s. But the most interesting thing is that this is not the usual manner for maori to dispose of the dead - in their pre-contact culture they burned the dead in order to stop the God of Blood from eating their corpses and growing strong enough to bring about the end of the world.
So the question is who exactly was this woman and why was she interred like this? Popular myth suggests that she was a chieftainess or priestess of the local iwi (tribe), and that she was interred to combat a curse, and the manner of her burial was to stop her bones from being possessed after death.
The local iwi deny anything to do with curses, but the odd thing is that maori are notoriously tetchy about their history, so you might expect that the Lady in the Lake was removed and either buried or put in a museum. But she's still there in her cave, and the entrance now has a grate over it so noone can get in and take her out.
Me and my cousin are planning on going to visit sometime for spooky /x/ times, but it just does to show what other weird maori shit could be in the inacessable cliffs around Fiordland.
